By: Didi Kirsten Tatlow
International Herald Tribune, March 6, 2012

BEIJING — Until Liu Ping emerged from the subway and onto a street under bright blue skies one recent Saturday, I wasn’t sure she’d even make it. I feared she’d be stopped on her journey by security officials from Xinyu, her hometown, a common occurrence in China for people who have incurred the displeasure of local officials.

But, suddenly, there she was: 1,350 kilometers from home, a middle-aged woman of average height with bright eyes, hair in a pony tail and frizzy bangs, bending forward under the weight of an old-fashioned, camouflage-patterned backpack that looked like a giant sausage. She stuck out her hand and we shook. Her hands were rough. My relief was enormous.

For my article on the state of Chinese women, I interviewed over a dozen women but two stuck in my mind: Liu Ping and Wu Qing. They were very different: Ms. Liu is a former steel worker; Ms. Wu, a former English professor from an illustrious family. Both were fighting for the right to be freely elected to Parliament, and for women’s rights.

The days before Beijing annual “two meetings,” of the legislature and a political advisory body, are among the worst time to try to see anyone deemed politically sensitive by the government. This time last year, Ms. Liu was in detention in a state-run “guesthouse” and she was concerned she’d be stuck away again any day.

Over days, Ms. Liu and I had talked on Skype, via connections that dropped frequently. Long crackling interviews where I had to shout and she did too, from the one-million-strong city of Xinyu in Jiangxi province in the south. She preferred Skype to her mobile, which she said was heavily monitored. ‘‘They may listen to Skype, too, but perhaps it’s safer,’’ she said.

Divorced from a policeman, the mother of one daughter who attends university, Ms. Liu had been forced into retirement at just 45. Men were also being retired early by her employer, Xinyu Iron & Steel, but most were working about five years longer, which is legal in China. They had more income and a bigger pension.

Facing poverty, Ms. Liu began fighting for redress in local courts. She petitioned the central government. Nothing worked. As she put it: ‘‘In China, if you have no money, you have no status. And women who retire early have very little money.’’

I asked if I could travel to Xinyu to meet her.

Her reply was immediate: ‘‘You can come, but I can’t guarantee your safety.’’

Several supporters and lawyers had been attacked by ‘‘them,’’ she said, thugs hired by the government. The latest incident had occurred on Feb. 12, days earlier, she said.

How about a photographer? Her answer was the same: ‘‘She can come, but I can’t guarantee her safety.’’

To me, of almost more concern was that she said many people who tried to visit were turned back by officials. Time was tight, and I ran a real risk of traveling there and not even meeting her.

But, she said, she traveled quite a bit.

Did she have a trip planned to a big city where the local Xinyu officials had less power? I asked.

At the end of February, she was going to Wukan to observe local elections. Wukan is a village in Guangdong province that rose up last year over land issues, where villagers recently held perhaps some of the freest elections in China in recent times.

Then she suddenly said: ‘‘I’ll come to Beijing.’’

It wasn’t that simple. I do not want to divulge how she got out of Xinyu.

After many sleepless hours on a train she refused my help carrying that large backpack. After we had talked, over a hot meal, she shouldered it again, saying: ‘‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll take care of myself.’’ Then, she disappeared back into the subway station, a 47-year-old, retired, poor, former steel worker who wants to change China, ‘‘One vote at a time,’’ she said.

Ms. Wu, for 27 years a deputy to her local parliament, or People’s Congress, shares that dream.

She comes from a very different social class from Ms. Liu, an intellectual blueblood whose parents studied in the United States before the 1949 Communist revolution.

Ms. Wu’s mother, the famous writer Bing Xin, or ‘‘Ice Heart,’’ was the daughter of a Qing Dynasty naval officer and active in student and feminist politics in the ferment of 1920s China, deeply respected for her wide range of writing. That included a first translation of the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran into Chinese. Ms. Wu’s father, Wu Wenzao, was a founder of the study of anthropology in China.

After the 1989 massacre in Beijing, high officials visited her mother at home and sought her blessing, said Ms. Wu, who today lives in the apartment her parents shared in the Beijing Minzu University.

‘‘My mother was so angry,’’ she said. ‘‘She banged the chair and said, ‘The students love the people, and I love the students!’ ’’ She sent the officials packing.

Now 74, Ms. Wu, a retired English professor, is outspoken: ‘‘I don’t care,’’ she says in perfect English. ‘‘You can quote everything I say.’’

She pointed to a calligraphy in the apartment: one word, ‘‘Listen,’’ a reminder of the importance of the Tuesday meetings with constituents that she began many years ago before her decades as a deputy ended last year when she wasn’t allowed to run again.

The other major duty of a deputy is to monitor the government, she said, something that most don’t do.

Recent years have seen a rights rollback across China, she said.

‘‘Human rights, women’s rights, everything is blocked,’’ she said. ‘‘All these movements are closely connected.’’

Despite that, she said, ‘‘I feel China is going in the right direction. People want more democracy, because the more corruption they see, the more legal awareness grows.’’

She said China today is undergoing a crucial period, an Enlightenment.

‘‘You have to stand up for it,” she said. “You have to fight for it.’’

By: Geoffrey Miller, Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent
Edge.org 

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and “fetal education” (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father’s semen (yangjing) and mother’s blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter’s book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.

But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao’s death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China’s population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children “later, longer, fewer, better”—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.

One of Deng’s legacies is China’s current strategy of maximizing “Comprehensive National Power”. This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America’s national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and ‘soft power’ (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai’s skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes “biopower”: creating the world’s highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population’s genes, health, and education (see Governing China’s Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).

Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of “yousheng” (“good birth”—which has the same literal meaning as “eugenics”). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current “gaokao” exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a “social fostering fee” (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China’s traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world’s most populous country depends upon it.

My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?

BEIJING — The men who barged through Shen Jianzhong’s door probably thought it was a routine assignment: Break in and beat Shen’s family into submission. Forced evictions to make way for real estate development are an everyday occurrence in China, and the family may have seemed no different from any in that situation.

It was only after they forced open the door, threw Shen’s wife to the ground and began to beat her that they learned the 38-year-old Shen and his 18-year-old son are kung fu masters.

“I take Bruce Lee very seriously,” said Shen in a telephone interview a month after the incident.

Shen says he does not recall exactly what happened during the fight, but an eight-minute video of the aftermath shows seven of the hired hands piled in a motionless heap in Shen’s doorway. Blood pools around the cheek of one; another lies halfway through the doorway, crumpled on the curb. Survivors mill about unsteadily on the street, glaring at the camera.

The video, shot by Shen’s wife, has attracted nearly a million views and many admiring comments since it was posted online Oct. 30. It has turned Shen into a minor folk hero in China, where many villagers have been forced out of their homes by da shou (“beating hands” in Chinese) who work for real estate developers.

Land confiscation is one of the most contentious political issues in China and accounts for many of the mass demonstrations that occur with regularity across the country. A report by Amnesty International this year estimated that confiscations have occurred in 43% of Chinese villages in 15 years.

Shen and his family live in Bazhou, a city in Hebei province 60 miles from central Beijing. Shen says he has trained in Lee’s Jeet Kune Do style of kung fu for 20 years. He has also been certified by the Hong Kong-based World Record Assn. for completing the highest number of roller push-ups in a minute. The exercise, which involves folding and unfolding at the waist like an inchworm while propped up with a small wheel, is more than a pastime for Shen. He and his wife run a small business teaching the exercise at home and around Bazhou, and they fear that the loss of their house would damage their livelihood.

Shen says he was teaching at a nearby gym on Oct. 29 when a group of more than 30 men assembled outside his house, which a local Communist Party official was planning to redevelop into an apartment complex. The men threatened and verbally abused Shen’s wife as she returned home with groceries.

Once Shen arrived and confirmed to the leader of the group that his family would not leave before receiving guarantees for housing, the assailants, he said, burst through the front door and began to beat his wife. In response, Shen and his teenage son, a graduate of traditional martial arts schools, entered the fray.

Many who have seen the video, which has not been blocked by Internet censors, applauded Shen’s victory. But the incident has also prompted a number of mournful remarks about social conditions in China.

“So do all Chinese people have to go to the Shaolin Temple [a historic martial arts academy] and study kung fu to do something about forced evictions?” wondered one recent blogger.

Shen said his troubles have actually increased since the attack. The next day, he said, nearly 100 men arrived in buses from out of town and surrounded his house. When the police refused to drive off the men on grounds that they were behaving peacefully, Shen fled with his wife to Beijing, hoping that media attention and the central government would help his family.

Shen said that in his absence his house has not been demolished, but that shortly after his departure for Beijing, the Bazhou police arrested his son.

Gangs like the one that attacked Shen’s home often operate with the consent of officials. After tax reforms cut into revenue across the country in the 1990s, local governments began exercising their right to rezone and sell land for real estate development. Chinese reports have said that the proceeds from recorded land sales, which go directly to the governments, far exceed the compensation offered to evicted inhabitants.

Rural Chinese, who receive plots of land allocated by local governments, have no individual land rights and cannot dispute rezoning plans drawn up by officials. But when officials do not offer sufficient compensation to households to relocate, the residents sometimes refuse to leave. Developers then evict the holdouts by force.

These forced evictions can provoke desperate responses. Some villagers have set themselves on fire, according to Chinese media reports.

Spectacular cases of armed resistance have also attracted attention, as when a farmer named Yang Youde used a homemade rocket launcher to drive away assailants from his house near Wuhan in 2010.

Chinese prosecutors often bring serious criminal charges against individuals who fight back. In a similar case in north China in 2009, a man named Zhang Jian was charged with murder after he stabbed and fatally wounded a man beating his wife during a forced eviction.

Shen returned to Bazhou on Nov. 28 to negotiate his son’s fate with the police and the developer. He says his son is still in detention, and unless he comes to an agreement with the developer he is afraid criminal charges will follow.

So while Shen is hopeful that the compensation for his property will increase, he also knows where the hard-won money is bound to go: He’s had to retain a lawyer for his son.

(Editor’s note: Here’s the video!)

By: PETER HAYS GRIES
NY Times, August 23, 2012 

LAST week, anti-Japanese protests swept nearly a dozen Chinese cities. Angry demonstrators overturned Toyotas while Japanese restaurants and businesses were vandalized. In the central Chinese city of Chengdu, where thousands protested, some banners declared, “Even if China is covered with graves, we must kill all Japanese!”

The immediate cause for the demonstrations was a flare-up over a few disputed, uninhabited islands controlled by Japan. (China calls them the Diaoyus; Japan calls them the Senkakus). On Aug. 15, Chinese nationalists landed and planted flags on the islands before being deported. Japanese nationalists retaliated by swimming ashore from nearby boats, further inflaming Chinese passions.

The rage of China’s crowds is genuine, and its roots lie in China’s nationalist ideology. The Chinese Communist Party uses its educational and propaganda systems to socialize citizens into a particular understanding of history. Maoist triumphalism has been eclipsed since the mid-1990s by a new “victim narrative” about Chinese suffering.

To most Chinese, the Japanese are “devils,” and the hatred reaches far into the past — from China’s humiliating loss in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 to World War II-era atrocities like the Rape of Nanking. Anti-Japanese anger has both ethical and visceral dimensions, sustaining it unlike other more fleeting forms of nationalism.

And although Chinese nationalist rage is primarily aimed at Japan, it is also directed toward the United States. As Chinese nationalists see it, America is the cause of China’s continuing problems with both Taiwan and Japan. If it were not for the “American imperialists” inserting the United States Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait during the Korean War, they say, Taiwan would long ago have been reunified with mainland China, erasing that “national humiliation.” And Japan’s continuing impertinence is also America’s fault: the United States’ alliance with Japan gives Japanese nationalists the gumption to defy a rising China.

The statements of American politicians further stoke Chinese anger at the United States. Speaking in Ohio late last week, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, Paul D. Ryan, accused China of stealing intellectual property, blocking access to its markets and manipulating the exchange rate. “President Obama promised he would stop these practices,” Mr. Ryan declared. “He said he’d go to the mat with China. Instead, they’re treating him like a doormat. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Mr. Ryan’s views echo those of Mitt Romney, who has promised if elected to declare China a “currency manipulator.” This could lead to punitive tariffs on Chinese imports and a possible trade war.

There is a long history of challengers using China to attack incumbents during presidential elections. Most famously, in 1992, Bill Clinton accused President George Bush of coddling the “butchers of Beijing” following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

While there is some antipathy toward China in the Democratic Party, particularly among labor unions and human rights activists, anti-Chinese sentiment these days comes mostly from the right. Economic conservatives don’t like the income redistribution and government regulation they associate with socialism; the Christian right fears the atheism of “Godless” Communism; and libertarians don’t like any government at all, let alone the authoritarian government of China.

China-bashing will therefore be good election year politics for the Romney-Ryan ticket. But it will be bad for America’s relations with China and could undermine our national security. Many Chinese are already suspicious of American intentions, and ideologically driven rhetoric from across the Pacific will only confirm their worst fears.

Worse, the Communist Party is currently undergoing its own leadership transition, and it is happening at a time when popular nationalism is bringing people into the streets. Because the party bases its legitimacy in large part on its nationalist credentials, no party leader is likely to quiet the nationalists until the new leadership is finalized.

Lacking a secure foundation of mutual trust, American-Chinese relations today remain susceptible to the random accidents of history that have plagued them in the past. In 1999, the mistaken NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, killed three and led to huge anti-American protests across China. And in 2001, the collision between a Chinese jet and an American surveillance plane led to a Chinese pilot’s death and an American crew’s being detained for two weeks.

If comparable accidents occur during this fall’s leadership transitions in both countries, popular pressure for more confrontational policies in both China and the United States will be more difficult to contain — and will increase the likelihood of conflict in Asia.

By David Barboza
NY Times: Monday, January 15, 2007

HONG KONG — Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge Caravan minivan, begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper.

She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper-trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China’s chronic paper shortages.

“I remember what a man in the business told me back then,” Zhang Yin said. “He said, ‘Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.’”

Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, she is now richer than virtually any other woman anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and the chief executive of eBay, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more.

Her companies take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ship it to China and recycle it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that are packed with toys, electronics and furniture that are stamped “Made in China” and then often shipped right back across the ocean to Western consumers.

After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.

Late last year, Forbes magazine named Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the Italian clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband.

Most of the world’s richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton sisters of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L’Oréal cosmetics and BMW.

But not Zhang. She started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world’s paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan, just outside Hong Kong, and the other based in Los Angeles.

“She’s a visionary,” said Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her large paper company list shares in Hong Kong. “She doesn’t mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company.”

That company, Nine Dragons Paper, is now the biggest paper maker in China. It raised nearly $500 million when it went public in Hong Kong last March.

Since then, shares of Nine Dragons have quadrupled, giving the company a market value of more than $5 billion. The Zhang family controls 72 percent of the company, which makes it one of the richest families in China.

Zhang’s smaller venture, America Chung Nam, which is based in Los Angeles, is one of the world’s biggest paper trading companies, with ties to recycling yards in New York, Chicago and California.

No other U.S. company sends so much material to China, in as many containers, as America Chung Nam, which was named the top U.S. exporter to China by volume for the fifth consecutive year in 2005, according to Piers Global Intelligence, which tracks import and export data.

Now, with the paper industry shifting to China, where labor and land are cheaper, Zhang and Nine Dragons are vowing to take on the world’s global paper giants, like International Paper, Weyerhauser and Smurfit Stone.

“My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards,” Zhang said emphatically during a short interview in her Hong Kong office. “My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.”

Zhang rarely grants interviews, and when she does, they are brief and controlled by an army of handlers.

Zhang does not go into detail about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, “I’m an honest businesswoman.”

Zhang was the oldest of eight children born into a military family from northern Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian border. During the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, her father was sent to prison, like millions of others who were branded “counterrevolutionaries” or “capitalist roaders.”

When the Cultural Revolution came to a close in 1976, her father was released from prison and “rehabilitated.” She went to work as an accountant.

After economic change got under way in China in the early 1980s, she moved to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, one of the first areas in China allowed to experiment with capitalism. There she started working for a foreign-Chinese joint venture paper trading company.

In 1985, she ventured to Hong Kong, which was then still a British colony. Ng Weiting, who was her partner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, says Zhang was driven and tough and had figured out how to get the best performance out of those who worked for her.

“When her employees asked for a pay raise, she would grant it if it was reasonable,” he recalled. “But when her employees made mistakes, she would criticize them severely. She made it clear when to reward and when to punish.”

Analysts say Zhang’s ebullient personality made her a great saleswoman and a savvy deal maker.

There were occasional threats from competitors, but being a woman was not a problem, Zhang said.

“Actually, I didn’t find it difficult,” she said. “I found men respected me.”

After Hong Kong’s paper market proved too small for her ambitions, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and married for the second time, to Liu Ming Chung, who was born in Taiwan, grew up in Brazil and is fluent in English.

Together, they formed America Chung Nam. At the time, China’s fast- growing economy was suffering from shortages of raw materials, and the country began looking overseas for scrap metal and used paper. Zhang Yin was one of the first to sell scrap paper to China.

China’s own paper products are poor quality, often made from grass, bamboo or rice stalks. Most paper made in the United States and Europe is derived from wood pulp.

America Chung Nam quickly made deals with American scrap yards and began shipping huge containers of paper back to China. The demand grew so fast that in 1995, Zhang (who also goes by her Hong Kong name, Cheung Yan) returned to China to found Nine Dragons, opening her first paper making facility in Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub in the bustling Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong. Liu now is the chief executive; Zhang is the chairwoman.

A decade later, the company has 11 giant paper making machines, 5,300 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and a huge new facility under construction in the country’s other booming export hub, the Yangtze River Delta area near Shanghai. Reported profit last year rose 349 percent to $175 million.

Nine Dragons is now one of the fastest growing paper companies, and yet it says it cannot keep up with demand for container board, the material used to make boxes, because of the booming growth in the Chinese economy and exports.

Foreign paper companies have been slow to build a sizable manufacturing base in China, Analysts doubt they will catch up any time soon. And Chinese manufacturers have advantages. They burn cheap coal rather than clean but expensive natural gas. And they are capitalizing on less expensive labor and the newest machinery, while paper makers in the United States and Europe are often using less efficient machines from the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s very difficult for U.S. companies to get into this business now,” said Woo at BNP Paribas. “I heard five or six years ago they looked at opportunities but they didn’t do anything.

“Right now,” Woo added, “the largest globally is Smurfit Stone. Weyerhauser is No. 2. By 2008, Nine Dragons could be No. 1.”

Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors.

But Zhang vigorously defends the appointment, saying her son is qualified and Nine Dragons is, after all, a family company. She has a second son in high school. And her younger brother, Zhang Chang Fei, is the company’s deputy chief executive.

Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing.

She has not lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the Queen of Trash, she doesn’t disown the title. But, she said, “Some day, I’d like to be known as the queen of containerboards.”